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Since March, we’ve been tracking the crusades for podcast listeners from both Apple and Spotify. Without fail, both companies have brought a new announcement or improvement to their podcast offerings each month. And, each month we’ve seen listeners gained by Spotify, while Apple often re-stakes their claim in countries that were previously stolen from them.

While we’ve been to just about every big industry event over the last several years, Podcast Movement earlier last month was one of our favorite events that we’ve been a part of! A big reason for that was our sponsorship of the Live Stage sessions. While there were a ton of great sessions throughout the week in Orlando, we had the pleasure of setting the program for five of the panels. Led by our Head of Content, Jonathan Zenti, we truly had a fantastic variety of topics and speakers.

We are thrilled to announce, along with Audioboom, a platform that distributes, monetizes and produces podcasts, our advertising technology partnership today. We have worked hand-in-hand to develop a scalable podcast advertising system that can quickly deliver ads to Audioboom’s inventory of podcasts.

We’re so thrilled that Podcast Movement is finally upon us! It’s the largest conference in the industry, so if you’re feeling overwhelmed… you’re not alone. Some of our leadership team took a few minutes to share the events they’re looking forward to the most, and gave some advice on how to get the most out of this podcast-packed week in Orlando!

It’s no secret, Apple and Spotify are engaged in a pretty intense battle for podcast listeners, and we’ve been reporting on it since things really started to heat up in March.

Over the last couple of months, Spotify has shifted gears and has been hitting Europe hard. As we detailed last month, Spotify’s takeover of Germany (among other European countries) was particularly significant because of how much the growth is occurring there in the podcast industry.

Podcast Movement kicks-off in one week, and we can’t wait to be a part of the industry’s biggest gathering of the year! In case you missed it, we recently announced that we’ll be presenting the Live Stage sessions from August 14 to 15. To see the full line-up, click here (and don’t forget to mark your calendars)!

Podcast Movement, the biggest podcasting gathering of the year, is less than two weeks away in sunny Orlando, Florida. While our team is, as always, looking forward to learning from and connecting with folks in the industry, we’re extra excited about this year’s Live Stage!

The Truth

Producing a successful podcast isn’t as simple as it once was. Don’t get us wrong, there’s still plenty of room to make a splash in the industry (as it’s just now really taking off), but it is important as a publisher to take note and make adjustments as insights and information become more readily available.

While there are plenty of general rules of thumb for things like topic selection, show flow/format, publishing times and marketing tactics, we wanted to see if we could drill down and find insights that would be specifically helpful depending on the category of podcast.

Good thing we did a deep dive, because we found that listening behaviors, based on the podcast’s category, significantly differ. Which means that, as a podcaster, publishing time, based on the podcast’s category, truly matters. This also gives advertisers the data they need to partner with particular podcast categories as an opportunity to develop more time-specific ads.

Since our March report the battle for podcasting power has stepped up a notch – both Apple Podcasts and Spotify have drawn their best weapons in a bid for audio dominance.

In May Bloomberg wrote that Spotify would be focusing the company’s efforts into overhauling the App, putting podcasts on a level playing with music. Furthermore, in the last 24 hours, the company announced that it would be testing out playlist features over the course of this summer, helping users to discover new podcast shows. Business Standard said they would be testing the water with just 5% of users in a small percentage of markets (the UK, US, and Canada to name a few) the company wants to combat the issue, quickly. Continue reading “Apple VS Spotify – May 2019”